Paint and raccoons...I love post titles like that, things you never thought would go together.

I have spent the entire day painting...with little concrete to show, it has been work on bits and pieces for another piece I am working on....and has been fun. I love it that my kids are big enough to tend themselves for long periods of time...and play with me too. Not at Polly Pockets either.

Eldest went on a sleep over last night and is EXHAUSTED...youngest has a friend over, the man is walking the dog in the hill, and I am painting away, and blogging while stuff dries...such is life with watercolour....I am working on a multi-media semi-sculptural painting, as it will not be purely two dimensional. At my painting class I have started on a painting of a Barcelona wall with a metal door rolled down over it and graffiti on top of the wall and doorway. The wall worked well...the door....meh, too dark and gloomy....so I am going to make it a real door....I will be slicing it open, gluing the entire mass to cardboard so that I can raise the painting clear enough to put things inside the doorway, indeed there will be a series of doorways, each painted and then a found object in the center middle....lets see if I can pull it off. I have been working on the internal doors, the cardboard mount, the stone trim for around the door....I don't feel any need to stick purely to a single painted sheet...it's fun to add and take away....we'll see how it goes.

This is a part of the trim for around the door that I will cut out and glue on.....



Jadepark who has a lovely, fascinating and beautifully written blog called "Writing under a Pseudonym" where I lurk regularly and comment infrequently, has just posted about seeing mice everywhere and what it could possibly be all about. I commented that this summer I was positively haunted by raccoons (along with an exponential increase in ocular bug suicides), and someone told me that if you see the same animal frequently, it means something...well, something more than frequent sightings...now this isn't entirely my shtick, coming in there alongside horoscopes and tea leaf readings, but I was curious so I did a handy-dandy google search and came up with this....

The raccoon is in some way the ultimate scavenger, able to open doors and garbage cans with his clever hands. Because of this and especially because of its mask, it is known as a bandit.
The mask, however, has a deeper meaning. It teaches us that none of us are quite what we seem, even to ourselves, that in our lives we can experience the freedom of many identities. This medicine helps us to assume and release the many roles we play.
Raccoon's lesson isn't that identities are negative, simply that -- just as this creature is dexterous with its hands -- so we can learn to be skilled at assuming identities with the same sense of appropriateness with which we choose clothes.


And this....

Raccoon: Clever, fastidious, curious Raccoons represent child-like qualities such as the need for play and "out of the box" thinking. With its tell-tale masked face, and tendencies for thievery, Raccoons masters of disguise and mischief.
Raccoon Animal Totems Facilitate:
Buoyancy of spirit, playfulness, light, airy fun feelings
Cleverness, unique perspective of thought that will lead to unique solutions to problems.
Luck and fortune, including ease in the search for finding what you desire

The change of identities rang home for me as I was in Canada at the time, and between the different job, house, language, culture, friends and responsibilities I do feel almost like an entirely different person though the fact that there were glaring spelling errors in the quote which I changed just for you all doesn't bode well for any sort of veracity they might be aiming to project.....the second one...well that didn't seem to have quite so much to do with anything...thought thinking outside the box could definitely be part of my job description....

Off to go and paint something else....hope your having a lively and lovely weekend.